First, I have check what can be installed from package manager.
Only Python and Perl.

Then I have checked if any of binaries are working.
For example, GapCloser is provided as binary. It took me some time to find source code…
Anyway, none of the binaries worked out of the box. It was expected, as Alpine Linux is super stripped…

I have installed build-base in order to be able to build things.
Additionally, BWA need zlib-dev.

After building & pushing, I have noticed that Alpine-based image is slightly smaller (99Mb), than the one based on Ubuntu (127Mb). Surprisingly, Alpine-based image is larger (273Mb) than Ubuntu-based (244Mb) after downloading. So, I’m afraid all of these hours didn’t really bring any substantial reduction in the image size.

Conclusion?
I was very motivated to build my application on Alpine Linux and expected substantial size reduction. But I’d say that relying on Alpine Linux image doesn’t always pay off in terms of smaller image size, forget about production time… And this I know from my own experience.
But maybe I didn’t something wrong? I’d be really glad for some advices/comments!

Nevertheless, stripping a few dependencies from my application (namely Biopython, numpy & scipy), resulted in much more compact image even using Ubuntu-based image (127Mb vs 191Mb; and 244Mb vs 440Mb after downloading). So I think this is the way to go 🙂